mygamestudies.com

I will be giving a talk at the Games Convention Online in Leipzig, Germany, on July 9th, and at Game Developers Conference Europe in Cologne, Germany, between August 16th to 18th. The Leipzig talk will be about the intersections of metrics and game design in social networks, and the GDC talk will focus on introducing and categorizing viral mechanics in social games. See you there!

The new year is here, and it's time for a short update after a couple of hectic months of contract work on social games, besides teaching duties. However, things will be getting more focused as I will leave the academia and step into developing social games full-time from the start of February 2010. Meanwhile, point your browsers to games4networks.posterous.com where I am posting links and notes related to the social games book project.

I'm glad to announce that I will start a book project for Carnegie Mellon University's ETC Press. The book will expand the work started with my recent blog posts, and in practice, the book will be written here. Starting in September, I hope to post a draft of a section every couple of weeks. You are very welcome to influence the final manuscript with your feedback. To start with, you'll be able to check out the book structure and content outline after the break.

Besides simple trivia or math quizzes, attempts at RPGish exploration of the Twitterverse, or word puzzle based movie-tie-in campaigns like the Terminator Salvation game, and the Spymaster flooding issues, we are starting to see game designs that are less obvious or inaccessible in their complexity. SNODS - 'Social Networks Online Defense Squad' - is a case in point: the game displays clever solutions in how it takes advantage of Twitter's social dynamics and how it builds a certain kind of social graph around you. Here's my analysis of the game, and some observations of how these solutions can be carried into social network games in general.

Game Design for Social Networks is a one-day workshop where the participants will learn about creating and designing game concepts for online social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. The workshop is built around my work on researching social game design drivers and frameworks, and putting them into practice.

Lately I have been giving a couple of workshops for business clients on how to introduce elements familiar from games, such as quest-like motivational structures, into their online services and applications. At the same time, I have been pursuing my research and development on social games. These two strands unite in a one-day workshop package which focuses on creating and designing game and 'funware' concepts for online social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

In the first part of the article, I argued that designing games for online social networks, such as Facebook, can benefit from mixing methods of game design with interaction and service design approaches. I also identified symbolic physicality, inherent sociability, spontaneity, and asynchronicity as aspects of social network games that can be set as design drivers in a project. However, they are high level concepts - in this, part two, I begin to elaborate a number of them into an evolving framework that helps in thinking about design decisions.

How can interaction design inform game design practices in the context of designing games for social networks? How can understanding of user motivations be formalized into design principles that would solve and inspire new design solutions in this particular design space? In the first of two parts, I explore specific issues that game designers will have to face when designing games for social networks.

Micro-blogging via Twitter has turned into my main channel for noting and voicing observations about game design topics. Nevertheless, I'm working on a conference paper on game design principles for social networks, and will post a draft of it here in a few days. Stay tuned!

A while ago i Sniper Lite was the most popular free game in the iPhone app store. It reminded me of a subject that has puzzled my mind for a long time. I like a good FPS - check out the post about Far Cry 2 - yet I have always been amazed at the fascination of this genre, and its players, with 'head shots', i.e. representations of exploding (human) heads. From the perspective of designing player experiences, there is undoubtedly an emotional trigger there. But why is this imagery so powerful?